October 30, 2008

A week ago, I had a long conversation with a four-star U.S. military officer who, until his recent retirement, had played a central role in directing the global war on terror. I asked him: what exactly is the strategy that guides the Bush administration's conduct of this war? His dismaying, if not exactly surprising, answer: there is none.

President Bush will bequeath to his successor the ultimate self-licking ice cream cone. To defense contractors, lobbyists, think-tankers, ambitious military officers, the hosts of Sunday morning talk shows, and the Douglas Feith-like creatures who maneuver to become players in the ultimate power game, the Global War on Terror is a boon, an enterprise redolent with opportunity and promising to extend decades into the future.

Yet, to a considerable extent, that very enterprise has become a fiction, a gimmicky phrase employed to lend an appearance of cohesion to a panoply of activities that, in reality, are contradictory, counterproductive, or at the very least beside the point. In this sense, the global war on terror relates to terrorism precisely as the war on drugs relates to drug abuse and dependence: declaring a state of permanent "war" sustains the pretense of actually dealing with a serious problem, even as policymakers pay lip-service to the problem's actual sources. The war on drugs is a very expensive fraud. So, too, is the Global War on Terror.

Anyone intent on identifying some unifying idea that explains U.S. actions, military and otherwise, across the Greater Middle East is in for a disappointment. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt laid down "Germany first" and then "unconditional surrender" as core principles. Early in the Cold War, the Truman administration devised the concept of containment, which for decades thereafter provided a conceptual framework to which policymakers adhered. Yet seven years into its Global War on Terror, the Bush administration is without a compass, wandering in the arid wilderness. To the extent that any inkling of a strategy once existed -- the preposterous neoconservative vision of employing American power to "transform" the Islamic world -- events have long since demolished the assumptions on which it was based.

Rather than one single war, the United States is presently engaged in several.

Ranking first in importance is the war for Bush's legacy, better known as Iraq. The President himself will never back away from his insistence that here lies the "central front" of the conflict he initiated after 9/11. Hunkered down in their bunker, Bush and his few remaining supporters would have us believe that the "surge" has, at long last, brought victory in sight and with it some prospect of redeeming this otherwise misbegotten and mismanaged endeavor. If the President can leave office spouting assurances that light is finally visible somewhere at the far end of a very long, very dark Mesopotamian tunnel, he will claim at least partial vindication. And if actual developments subsequent to January 20 don't turn out well, he can always blame the outcome on his successor.

Next comes the orphan war. This is Afghanistan, a conflict now in its eighth year with no signs of ending anytime soon. Given the attention lavished on Iraq, developments in Afghanistan have until recently attracted only intermittent notice. Lately, however, U.S. officials have awakened to the fact that things are going poorly, both politically and militarily. Al Qaeda persists. The Taliban is reasserting itself. Expectations that NATO might ride to the rescue have proven illusory. Apart from enabling Afghanistan to reclaim its status as the world's number one producer of opium, U.S. efforts to pacify that nation and nudge it toward modernity have produced little.

The Pentagon calls its intervention in Afghanistan Operation Enduring Freedom. The emphasis was supposed to be on the noun. Unfortunately, the adjective conveys the campaign's defining characteristic: enduring as in endless. Barring a radical re-definition of purpose, this is an enterprise which promises to continue, consuming lives and treasure, for a long, long time.

In neighboring Pakistan, meanwhile, there is the war-hidden-in-plain-sight. Reports of U.S. military action in Pakistan have now become everyday fare. Air strikes, typically launched from missile-carrying drones, are commonplace, and U.S. ground forces have also conducted at least one cross-border raid from inside Afghanistan. Although the White House doesn't call this a war, it is -- a gradually escalating war of attrition in which we are killing both terrorists and noncombatants. Unfortunately, we are killing too few of the former to make a difference and more than enough of the latter to facilitate the recruitment of new terrorists to replace those we eliminate.

Finally -- skipping past the wars-in-waiting, which are Syria and Iran -- there is Condi's war. This clash, which does not directly involve U.S. forces, may actually be the most important of all. The war that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has made her own is the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Having for years dismissed the insistence of Muslims, Arabs and non-Arabs alike, that the plight of the Palestinians constitutes a problem of paramount importance, Rice now embraces that view. With the fervor of a convert, she has vowed to broker an end to that conflict prior to leaving office in January 2009.

Given that Rice brings little -- perhaps nothing -- to the effort in the way of fresh ideas, her prospects of making good as a peacemaker appear slight. Yet, as with Bush and Iraq, so too with Rice and the Palestinian problem: she has a lot riding on the effort. If she flops, history will remember her as America's least effective secretary of state since Cordell Hull spent World War II being ignored, bypassed, and humiliated by Franklin Roosevelt. She will depart Foggy Bottom having accomplished nothing.

There's nothing inherently wrong in fighting simultaneously on several fronts, as long as actions on front A are compatible with those on front B, and together contribute to overall success. Unfortunately, that is not the case with the Global War on Terror. We have instead an illustration of what Winston Churchill once referred to as a pudding without a theme: a war devoid of strategic purpose.

This absence of cohesion -- by now a hallmark of the Bush administration -- is both a disaster and an opportunity. It is a disaster in the sense that we have, over the past seven years, expended enormous resources, while gaining precious little in return.

Bush's supporters beg to differ, of course. They credit the president with having averted a recurrence of 9/11, doubtless a commendable achievement but one primarily attributable to the fact that the United States no longer neglects airport security. To argue that, say, the invasion and occupation of Iraq have prevented terrorist attacks against the United States is the equivalent of contending that Israel's occupation of the West Bank since in 1967 has prevented terrorist attacks against the state of Israel.

Yet the existing strategic vacuum is also an opportunity. When it comes to national security at least, the agenda of the next administration all but sets itself. There is no need to waste time arguing about which issues demand priority action.

First-order questions are begging for attention. How should we gauge the threat? What are the principles that should inform our response? What forms of power are most relevant to implementing that response? Are the means at hand adequate to the task? If not, how should national priorities be adjusted to provide the means required? Given the challenges ahead, how should the government organize itself? Who -- both agencies and individuals -- will lead?

To each and every one of these questions, the Bush administration devised answers that turned out to be dead wrong. The next administration needs to do better. The place to begin is with the candid recognition that the Global War on Terror has effectively ceased to exist. When it comes to national security strategy, we need to start over from scratch.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His bestselling new book is The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books). To listen to a podcast in which he discusses issues relevant to this article, click here.

October 14, 2008

Among my somewhat over-the-hill crowd -- I'm 64 -- there's one thing friends have said to me repeatedly since the stock market started to tumble, the global economic system began to melt down, and Iceland went from bank haven to bankrupt. They say, "I'm just not looking. I don't want to know." And they're not referring to the world situation, they're talking about their pension plans, or 401(k)s, or IRAs, or whatever they put their money into, so much of which is melting away in plain sight even as Iceland freezes up.

I've said it myself. Think of it as a pragmatic acknowledgement of reality at an extreme moment, but also as a statement of denial and despair. The point is: Why look? The news is going to be worse than you think, and it's way too late anyway. This is what crosses your mind when the ground under you starts to crumble. Don't look, not yet, not when the life you know, the one you took for granted, is vanishing, and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it.

Today, in my world at least, this is the most commonplace of comments. It's just not a line I've seen much when the press and TV bring on the parade of financial experts -- most of whom are there largely because they didn't have the faintest idea that anything like this might happen. Whether they're reporting on, or opining about, the latest market nosedives, panic selling, chaotic bailouts, arcane derivatives, A.I.G. facials, or bank and stock-exchange closures, it still always sounds like someone else's story. I guess that's the nature of the media.

It's professional for reporters and pundits to write or talk about the pain of others, not their own. Normally, you just assume that's the case. So, for instance, when Frank Bruni, in a front pageNew York Times piece on the second presidential debate, writes, "Now the situation looks gloomier still, with markets in other continents tumbling -- with a world of hurt at hand," it really doesn't cross your mind that he might be including Frank Bruni in that description.

Here's a rock-you-to-your-socks fact I happened to read in a news report the afternoon of the day that Barack Obama and John McCain had their town hall meeting with 80 uncommitted voters and moderator Tom Brokaw. In the last 15 months, according to the Associated Press, Americans lost $2 trillion from their retirement plans. Now, that's a world of hurt and you could feel it the moment Brokaw first called on an audience member. Allen Shaffer rose and asked: "With the economy on the downturn and retired and older citizens and workers losing their incomes, what's the fastest, most positive solution to bail these people out of the economic ruin?" I have no idea what Shaffer's situation is, but I'll tell you this, his didn't sound like a reporter's question. It sounded close to the bone. It sounded like a world of hurt. Not surprisingly, neither presidential candidate actually responded, in part, undoubtedly, because to be close to the truth either would have had to say something like: Hey, how the hell do I know?

October 07, 2008

Will Economic Meltdown, Race, or Regional Loyalty Be the Trump Card in Election 2008?By Chalmers Johnson

In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama called the forthcoming presidential election a "defining moment" in this country's history. It is conceivable that he is right. There are precedents in American history for an election inaugurating a period of reform and political realignment.

Such a development, however, is extremely rare and surrounded by contingencies normally beyond the control of the advocates of reform. So let me speculate about whether the 2008 election might set in motion a political reconfiguration -- and even a political renaissance -- in the United States, restoring a modicum of democracy to the country's political system, while ending our march toward imperialism, perpetual warfare, and bankruptcy that began with the Cold War.

The political blunders, serious mistakes, and governmental failures of the last eight years so discredited the administration of George W. Bush -- his average approval rating has fallen to 27% and some polls now show him dipping into the low twenties -- that his name was barely mentioned in the major speeches at the Republican convention. Even John McCain has chosen to run under the banner of "maverick" as a candidate of "change," despite the fact that his own party's misgoverning has elicited those demands for change.

Bringing the opposition party to power, however, is not in itself likely to restore the American republic to good working order. It is almost inconceivable that any president could stand up to the overwhelming pressures of the military-industrial complex, as well as the extra-constitutional powers of the 16 intelligence agencies that make up the U.S. Intelligence Community, and the entrenched interests they represent. The subversive influence of the imperial presidency (and vice presidency), the vast expansion of official secrecy and of the police and spying powers of the state, the institution of a second Defense Department in the form of the Department of Homeland Security, and the irrational commitments of American imperialism (761 active military bases in 151 foreign countries as of 2008) will not easily be rolled back by the normal workings of the political system.

For even a possibility of that occurring, the vote in November would have to result in a "realigning election," of which there have been only two during the past century -- the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and of Richard Nixon in 1968. Until 1932, the Republicans had controlled the presidency for 56 of the previous 72 years, beginning with Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860. After 1932, the Democrats occupied the White House for 28 of the next 36 years.

The 1968 election saw the withdrawal of the candidacy of President Lyndon Johnson under the pressure of the Vietnam War, the defeat of his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, not to mention the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. That election, based on Nixon's so-called southern strategy, led to a new political alignment nationally, favoring the Republicans. The essence of that realignment lay in the running of Republican racists for office in the old Confederate states where the Democrats had long been the party of choice. Before 1968, the Democrats had also been the majority party nationally, winning seven of the previous nine presidential elections. The Republicans won seven of the next ten between 1968 and 2004.

Of these two realigning elections, the Roosevelt election is certainly the more important for our moment, ushering in as it did one of the few truly democratic periods in American political history. In his new book, Democracy Incorporated, Princeton political theorist Sheldon Wolin suggests the following: "Democracy is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs."

However, the founders of this country and virtually all subsequent political leaders have been hostile to democracy in this sense. They favored checks and balances, republicanism, and rule by elites rather than rule by the common man or woman. Wolin writes, "The American political system was not born a democracy, but born with a bias against democracy. It was constructed by those who were either skeptical about democracy or hostile to it. Democratic advance proved to be slow, uphill, forever incomplete.

"The republic existed for three-quarters of a century before formal slavery was ended; another hundred years before black Americans were assured of their voting rights. Only in the twentieth century were women guaranteed the vote and trade unions the right to bargain collectively. In none of these instances has victory been complete: women still lack full equality, racism persists, and the destruction of the remnants of trade unions remains a goal of corporate strategies. Far from being innate, democracy in America has gone against the grain, against the very forms by which the political and economic power of the country has been and continues to be ordered."

Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal introduced a brief period of approximate democracy. This ended with the U.S. entry into World War II, when the New Deal was replaced by a wartime economy based on munitions manufacture and the support of weapons producers. This development had a powerful effect on the American political psyche, since only war production ultimately overcame the conditions of the Great Depression and restored full employment. Ever since that time, the United States has experimented with maintaining a military economy and a civilian economy simultaneously. Over time, this has had the effect of misallocating vital resources away from investment and consumption, while sapping the country's international competitiveness.

Socioeconomic conditions in 2008 bear a certain resemblance to those of 1932, making a realigning election conceivable. Unemployment in 1932 was a record 33%. In the fall of 2008, the rate is a much lower 6.1%, but other severe economic pressures abound. These include massive mortgage foreclosures, bank and investment house failures, rapid inflation in the prices of food and fuel, the failure of the health care system to deliver service to all citizens, a growing global-warming environmental catastrophe due to the over-consumption of fossil fuels, continuing costly military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, with more on the horizon due to foreign policy failures (in Georgia, Ukraine, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, and elsewhere), and record-setting budgetary and trade deficits.

The question is: Can the electorate be mobilized, as in 1932, and will this indeed lead to a realigning election? The answer to neither question is an unambiguous yes.

The Race Factor

Even to contemplate that happening, of course, the Democratic Party first has to win the election -- and in smashing style -- and it faces two formidable obstacles to doing so: race and regionalism.

Although large numbers of white Democrats and independents have told pollsters that the race of a candidate is not a factor in how they will decide their vote, there is ample evidence that they are not telling the truth -- either to pollsters or, in many cases perhaps no less importantly, to themselves. Andrew Hacker, a political scientist at Queen's College, New York, has written strikingly on this subject, starting with the phenomenon known as the "Bradley Effect."

The term refers to Tom Bradley, a former black mayor of Los Angeles, who lost his 1982 bid to become governor of California, even though every poll in the state showed him leading his white opponent by substantial margins. Similar results appeared in 1989, when David Dinkins ran for mayor of New York City and Douglas Wilder sought election as governor of Virginia. Dinkins was ahead by 18 percentage points, but won by only two, and Wilder was leading by nine points, but squeaked through by only half a percent. Numerous other examples lead Hacker to offer this advice to Obama campaign offices: always subtract 7% from favorable poll results. That's the potential Bradley effect.

Meanwhile, the Karl Rove-trained Republican Party has been hard at work disenfranchising black voters. Although we are finally beyond property qualifications, written tests, and the poll tax, there are many new gimmicks. These include laws requiring voters to present official identity cards that include a photo, which, for all practical purposes, means either a driver's license or a passport. Many states drop men and women from the voting rolls who have been convicted of a felony but have fully completed their sentences, or require elaborate procedures for those who have been in prison -- where, Hacker points out, black men and women outnumber whites by nearly six to one -- to be reinstated. There are many other ways of disqualifying black voters, not the least of which is imprisonment itself. After all, the United States imprisons a greater proportion of its population than any other country on Earth, a burden that falls disproportionately on African Americans. Such obstacles can be overcome but they require heroic organizational efforts.

The Regional Factor

Regionalism is the other obvious obstacle standing in the way of attempts to mobilize the electorate on a national basis for a turning-point election. In their book, Divided America: The Ferocious Power Struggle in American Politics, the political scientists Earl and Merle Black argue that the U.S. electorate is hopelessly split. This division, which has become more entrenched with each passing year, is fundamentally ideological, but it is also rooted in ethnicity and manifests itself in an intense and never-ending partisanship. "In modern American politics," they write, "a Republican Party dominated by white Protestants faces a Democratic Party in which minorities plus non-Christian whites far outnumber white Protestants."

Another difference on the rise involves gender imbalance. In the 1950s, the Democratic Party, then by far the larger of the two parties, was evenly balanced between women and men. Fifty years later, a smaller but still potent Democratic Party contained far more women than men (60% to 40%). "In contrast, the Republican Party has shifted from an institution with more women than men in the 1950s (55% to 45%) to one in which men and women were as evenly balanced in 2004 as Democrats were in the 1950s."

Now, add in regionalism, specifically the old American antagonism between the two sides in the Civil War. That once meant southern Democrats versus northern Republicans. By the twenty-first century, however, that binary division had given way to something more complex -- "a new American regionalism, a pattern of conflict in which Democrats and Republicans each possess two regional strongholds and in which the Midwest, as the swing region, holds the balance of power in presidential elections."

The five regions Earl and Merle Black identify -- each becoming more partisan and less characteristic of the nation as a whole -- are the Northeast, South, Midwest, Mountains/Plains, and Pacific Coast. The Northeast, although declining slightly in population, has become unambiguously liberal Democratic. It is composed of New England (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont), the Middle Atlantic states (Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania), and the District of Columbia. It is the primary Democratic stronghold.

The South is today a Republican stronghold made up of the eleven former Confederate states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia). A second Republican stronghold, displaying an intense and growing partisanship, is the Mountains/Plains region, composed of the 13 states of Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.

A second Democratic stronghold is the Pacific Coast, which includes the nation's most populous state, California, joined by Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington. The Midwest, where national elections are won or lost by the party able to hold onto, and mobilize, its strongholds, is composed of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. The two most important swing states in the nation are Florida (27 electoral votes) and Ohio (20 electoral votes), which the Democrats narrowly lost, generally under contested circumstances, in both 2000 and 2004.

These five regions are today entrenched in the nation's psyche. Normally, they ensure very narrow victories by one party or another in national elections. There is no way to get around them, barring a clear and unmistakable performance failure by one of the parties -- as happened to the Republicans during the Great Depression and may be happening again.

Why This Might Still Be a Turning-Point Election

Beyond these negatives, in 2008 there have been a number of developments that speak to the possibility of a turning-point election. First, the weakness (and age) of the Republican candidate may perhaps indicate that the Party itself is truly at the end of a forty-year cycle of power. Second, of course, is the meltdown, even possibly implosion, of the U.S. economy on the Republican watch (specifically, on that of George W. Bush, the least popular President in memory, as measured by recent opinion polls). This has put states in the Midwest and elsewhere that Bush took in 2000 and 2004 into play.

Third, there has been a noticeable trend in shifting party affiliations in which the Democrats are gaining membership as the Republicans are losing it, especially in key battleground states like Pennsylvania where, in 2008 alone, 474,000 new names have gone on the Democratic rolls, according to the Washington Post, even as the Republicans have lost 38,000. Overall, since 2006, the Democrats have gained at least two million new members, while the Republicans have lost 344,000. According to the Gallup organization, self-identified Democrats outnumbered self-identified Republicans by a 37% to 28% margin this June, a gap which may only be widening.

Fourth, there is the possibility of a flood of new, especially young, first-time voters, who either screen calls or live on cell phones, not landlines, and so are being under-measured by pollsters, as black voters may also be in this election. (However, when it comes to the young vote, which has been ballyhooed in a number of recent elections without turning out to be significant on Election Day, we must be cautious.) And fifth, an influx of new Democratic voters in states like Virginia, Colorado, and New Mexico threatens, in this election at least, to dent somewhat the normal regional loyalty patterns described by Earl and Merle Black.

Above all, two main issues will determine whether or not the November election will be a realigning one. Republican Party failures in managing the economy, in involving the country in catastrophic wars of choice, and in ignoring such paramount issues as global warming all dictate a Democratic victory. Militating against that outcome is racist hostility, conscious or otherwise, toward the Democratic Party's candidate as well as deep-seated regional loyalties. While the crisis caused by the performance failures of the incumbent party seems to guarantee a realigning election favoring the Democrats, it is simply impossible to determine the degree to which race and regionalism may sway voters. The fate of the nation hangs in the balance.

October 06, 2008

The U.S. Intelligence Community as Seers Without Sizzle By Tom Engelhardt

The year is 2010 and, yes, Saddam Hussein is gone and there are no American troops in Iraq, but, as the report suggests, "the challenge will be to see whether a modern, secular successor government emerges that does not threaten its neighbors" -- especially since those dogged Iraqis are back at work on their nuclear weapons program. Meanwhile, the national security agenda of American policymakers, who face no conventional military challenges, is dominated by five questions: "whether to intervene, when, with whom, with what tools, and to what end?"

Surveying the world in 2010, we find a Russia irredeemably in economic decline, a China beset by too many internal problems to hope for military dominance in Asia, and a North Korea so transformed that military tensions have vanished from the Korean peninsula (along, evidently, with the North Korean nuclear program). Oh, and those food riots that swept the globe recently, they never happened. After all, it's well known that food production has kept up with population pressures, and energy production has been more than a match for global energy needs. As for global warming? Never heard of it. On the bright side, the key to the future is "international cooperation," led, of course, by us truly.

An alternate universe from a missing Star Trek episode or that new sci-fi novel you haven't read yet? Not quite. Thanks to the best brains in the many agencies that make up the U.S. Intelligence Community or IC, it's been possible for me to venture into the future, just as our own world is being shaken to its roots -- into the years 2010 and 2015, to be exact.

There, surprisingly enough, life is relatively calm and the United States remains the preeminent Power of Powers. There, you aren't likely to hear the words "deep recession" or "depression" on anyone's lips.

In that far perkier future our intelligence analysts sent me to, you can exist forever and there will never be those four jets, box cutters, and 19 hijackers. The Bush administration will never barge into the world "unilaterally." The U.S. will not be renowned for torture techniques or an offshore secret prison system of injustice, and nothing will contravene then-Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Ben Bernanke's 2005 assessment that soaring housing prices were due to "strong economic fundamentals."

In neither 2010 nor 2015 will anyone have heard of the collapse of Lehman Brothers or the giant insurance company A.I.G. In neither year will newspapers have headlines like "Worst Crisis Since '30s, With No End Yet in Sight." In neither will anyone know that the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, conducting two bankrupting wars that refused to end.

Think of it as the blandest, tidiest, least-likely-to-occur future around. And it was even paid for with your tax dollars.

Planting the Stars and Stripes in Future Soil

In a world where shock has repeatedly been the name of the game, where tall towers fall in clouds of toxic ash, investment houses disappear in the blink of an eye, and a black man is the Democratic Party's candidate for president of the United States, the American intelligence community has been straining to imagine a future without surprises or discontinuities. As its experts summed the matter up in 1997, "Genuine discontinuities -- sharp nonevolutionary breaks with the past -- are rare, and our focus is on evolutionary change."

Lucky is the country that didn't bet its foreign policy on that bit of intelligence wisdom. Of course, in the long decade of hubris, from the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 (something American intelligence neither predicted nor expected) to the moment American troops entered Baghdad in April 2003, it seemed obvious enough in Washington that a generational Pax Americana was settling over the world.

As a result, the futures the IC's analysts produced back then were remarkable mainly for their inability to imagine what was stirring under the surface of the obvious. As a result, when you visit those futures, you're not likely to have the urge to throw away your Arthur Clark or Isaac Asimov or Philip Dick or William Gibson classics. But maybe you'll still be curious, as I was, to know what that "community's" top minds missed when they peered ahead. Think of it as a window into the limits of our intelligence services when they tried to grasp the real nature of U.S. power by forecasting the future.

What's strange is that the distant future was once the province of utopian or dystopian thinkers, pulp fiction writers, oddballs, visionaries, even outright nuts, but not government intelligence services. Peering into it was, at its best, a movingly strange individual adventure of the imagination, whether you were reading Edward Bellamy or Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin or H.G. Wells, George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. That was, of course, before the Pentagon and allied outfits began planning for the weaponry of 2020, 2035, and 2050; before war turned nuclear and so, with the exception of two cities in 1945, could only be "fought" in think tanks via futuristic scenario writing; before names like Complex 2030, Vision 2020, UAV [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle] Roadmap 2030 were regularly affixed to government programs. In fact, the U.S. government has been planting the Stars and Stripes deep in territory previous left to sci-fi dreamers for quite a while.

In the process, regularly analyzing the distant future has become almost as much the duty of the 18 agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community as doing National Intelligence Estimates on Iran. Ever since the 1990s, they have been hard at work preparing committee-made futures that simply won't happen. To judge by their work, they are a community of seers without sizzle, and yet the next of their fantasy futures, for the distant year 2025, is about to be made public.

Predicting America's Diminishing Power

Every few years the National Intelligence Council (NIC) is mandated to provide "'over the horizon' estimates of broader trends at work in the world." Just in case you've never heard of the NIC, it describes itself as "a center of strategic thinking within the U.S. Government, reporting to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and providing the President and senior policymakers with analyses of foreign policy issues that have been reviewed and coordinated throughout the Intelligence Community."

Sometime in the 1990s, its analysts embarked on a project, released in 1997, called Global Trends 2010, a best-guesstimate about the nature of our world 13 years hence. In 2000, Global Trends (GT) 2015 came out, followed in 2004 by GT 2020.

As the 2020 project proudly described the process, the IC "consulted experts from around the world in a series of regional conferences to offer a truly global perspective. We organized conferences on five continents to solicit the views of foreign experts…" In other words, no prospective stone was left prospectively unturned to keep top U.S. policymakers up to speed.

Recently, this Washington Post headline caught my eye: "Reduced Dominance Is Predicted for U.S." As the Post's Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus noted, the latest of the NIC's reports, Global Trends 2025, due out this December, was previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, "the U.S. intelligence community's top analyst." Officially, he's the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis as well as the Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. The report is already supposedly being briefed to presidential candidates McCain and Obama.

Indeed, talking to the 2008 Intelligence and National Security Alliance Analytic Transformation Conference, Fingar praised the IC for its job restoring "confidence in the product" (a not-so-subtle reference to what the Bush administration did to its reputation back in 2002-2003) and hyped the IC's "17 years of forecasting and scenario building." He then previewed the upcoming "product" on the futuristic intelligence block, "intended to shape the thinking of [the] new administration," and here was his prediction of America's fate as 2025 approaches:

"[T]he U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished over this period of time… the overwhelming dominance that the United States has enjoyed in the international system in military, political, economic, and arguably, cultural arenas is eroding and will erode at an accelerating pace with the partial exception of military. But part of the argument here is that by 15 years from now, the military dimension [that] will remain the most preeminent will be the least significant…"

I'd have to guess that NIC members are, at this very moment, doing a little rewriting on this issue as the known world descends around our projected ears. Anyway, just how useful was Fingar's "news," even before our financial system plunged into the maw?

Let's face it, if the Post headline had said: "America [or China, or a clique of petro-states] Predicted to Rule World in 2025" that might have been news. But if you've been paying the slightest attention to your daily paper, Fingar's speech offered a hint of a future hardly more illuminating than a headline saying, "Water predicted to remain in Indian Ocean in 2025."

Birthed by the T. Rex of global intelligence combines, his revelation represents, at best, a hen's egg of knowledge. Admittedly, such a prediction might have taken real insight back in 1997 when the U.S. was riding high, and only a handful of declinist scholars like Immanuel Wallerstein were considering the possibility that American power was not on a path to new heights. But in 2008, did anyone really need costly conferences on five continents to imagine a future in which that power would be in decline, a forecast that is now a commonplace of bestselling book titles and could have been read at websites like this one years ago?

The Future Behind Us

Still, I couldn't resist zipping back to 1997 and then 2000 just to get a sense of what -- when Washington was riding high -- the IC thought lay ahead in 2010 and 2015.

Three years after it made its 1997 findings public, the NIC's analysts saw nothing but signs of the increasing dominance of American power in the global future. Like the new administration of that moment, they were bullish on America, so much so that they even critiqued the NIC's seers of 1997 as weak-kneed on the U.S.: "The effect of the United States as the preponderant power is introduced in GT 2015. The US role as a global driver has emerged more clearly over the past four years, particularly as many countries debate the impact of 'US hegemony' on their domestic and foreign policies."

While, in 2000, there seemed no serious obstacles to the growth of American power 15 years in the future, poor Russia remained a declinist state which, fortunately, would "continue to lack the resources to impose its will," and China faced "an array of political, social, and economic pressures that will increasingly challenge the regime's legitimacy, and perhaps its survival." And here was yet more splendid news from the NIC's point of view: "The global economy, overall, will return to the high levels of growth reached in the 1960s and early 1970s." Even better, "[i]nternational cooperation will continue to increase through 2015." (Evidently, they forgot to brief top Bush administration officials on that particular prediction!)

Despite some discussion of non-state actors, loose nukes, and a potential "trend toward greater lethality in terrorist attacks" -- after all, two American embassies in Africa and the USS Cole had by then been devastated -- the IC saw no global wars on terror ahead. Terrorism was an outlier in a heady world of "globalization" that, in 2015, was remarkably sunny-side up when it came to us.

As with any document by committee, many of the report's reigning predictions were carefully qualified elsewhere in the document, a familiar kind of cover-your-butt-ism in which you bravely predict the obvious -- and (just in case) its opposite. The exuberant U.S. economy, to take a typical example, was also described as "vulnerable to a loss of international confidence in its growth prospects that could lead to a sharp downturn, which, if long lasting, would have deleterious economic and policy consequences for the rest of the world." There was even an appendix ("Four Alternative Global Futures") that offered modest scenarios in which U.S. power might "wane" somewhat, but here was the IC's money paragraph for 2015:

"Experts agree that the United States, with its decisive edge in both information and weapons technology, will remain the dominant military power during the next 15 years. Further bolstering the strong position of the United States are its unparalleled economic power, its university system, and its investment in research and development -- half of the total spent annually by the advanced industrial world. Many potential adversaries, as reflected in doctrinal writings and statements, see US military concepts, together with technology, as giving the United States the ability to expand its lead in conventional warfighting capabilities."

Sigh… In the future that's now behind us, we know just where that sort of thinking led.

By 2004, of course, things were beginning to go sour in Bushworld, and so the 2020 study had a somewhat more dystopian edge to it. (It could pose the question, "U.S. Unipolarity – How Long Can It Last?" even if the answer was: a long time.) And finally, this December, it seems, the "waning" of U.S. power will make it, just a tad late, out of the appendices and into the bloodstream of the future.

Handmaidens of Delusion

What's undeniably fascinating about these futuristic exercises is the degree to which they reflect the limits of the world of the present as seen from Washington; they reflect, that is, just what Washington has been (and largely still remains) incapable of grasping about the nature of power -- and danger -- on this planet. In this way, the IC's analysts remained handmaidens to delusion, not just when it came to foreign powers, but when it came to our own country. The Global Trends reports will remain significant documents for future historians who want to chart just how glacially slow was Washington's realization that the collapse of Soviet power didn't actually mean American power was destined to be transcendent on Earth.

In its predictions, it's clear that the IC had little better luck getting its agents embedded in the future than it did getting them inside al-Qaeda or into Iran. Not surprisingly, given what we know about the bureaucratic morass that is American intelligence, the GT reports have all the faults of intelligence by committee and negotiation -- which is why H.G. Wells, Arthur Clark, Isaac Asimov, George Orwell, and others, who caught something of the strangeness of possible futures, would never have had a chance in hell of succeeding in careers in the IC. Wells's Martians with their poison gas and flying machines, Orwell's Big Brother with his "memory hole," and Huxley's "feelies" would have been left on the negotiating room floor. Far too quirky. Far too many "discontinuities" involved for the IC.

Better to forecast what the people you brief already believe, raised to the highest predictive power and squared, and skip the oddballs with their strange hunches, the sorts who might actually have a knack for recognizing the shock of the future lurking in the present. Don't pay any mind, for that matter, to FBI agents reporting the truly strange in the present -- like, say, "a 33-year-old French citizen of Moroccan descent" at a flight school who wants to learn how to fly a commercial jet, but not how it takes off or lands.

What the Global Trends documents represent, then, is not a deep dive into the mysteries of the future, but a series of belly flops by an unbearably obese IC into a barely grasped present. Let 18 intelligence outfits proliferate and one thing is guaranteed: in some future, maybe even tomorrow, no matter how powerful you are, you won't know what hit you.

If I were the next president, I might prefer to skip the IC, spend a few nights with a little science fiction, peer into the darkness, muster some commonsense, and take a wild guess or two.

[Note on Readings: The Global Trends reports are all on line. You can read them by clicking here: Global Trends 2010, Global Trends 2015, Global Trends 2020. You can read both of Thomas Fingar's recent speeches by clicking here (pdf file -- and fair warning, despite his billing as the "top analyst" in the U.S. Intelligence Community, they are almost unbearably banal, soporific, and remarkably incoherent). Finally, I wrote about Global Trends 2020 when it came out in 2004. For any of you who might find that of interest, click here.]

October 04, 2008

They seem to agree on Iran, Nato and disapproval of President George Bush’s failed foreign adventures. But they come from different generations and backgrounds, and their priorities and approach to the rest of the world couldn’t be more different.

October 02, 2008

There has been much moaning, air-sucking, and outrage about the $700 billion that the U.S. government is thinking of throwing away on rich New York bankers who have been ripping us off for the past few years and then letting greed drive their businesses into a variety of ditches. In fact, we dole out similar amounts of money every year in the form of payoffs to the armed services, the military-industrial complex, and powerful senators and representatives allied with the Pentagon.

On Wednesday, September 24th, right in the middle of the fight over billions of taxpayer dollars slated to bail out Wall Street, the House of Representatives passed a $612 billion defense authorization bill for 2009 without a murmur of public protest or any meaningful press comment at all. (The New York Times gave the matter only three short paragraphs buried in a story about another appropriations measure.)

The defense bill includes $68.6 billion to pursue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is only a down-payment on the full yearly cost of these wars. (The rest will be raised through future supplementary bills.) It also included a 3.9% pay raise for military personnel, and $5 billion in pork-barrel projects not even requested by the administration or the secretary of defense. It also fully funds the Pentagon's request for a radar site in the Czech Republic, a hare-brained scheme sure to infuriate the Russians just as much as a Russian missile base in Cuba once infuriated us. The whole bill passed by a vote of 392-39 and will fly through the Senate, where a similar bill has already been approved. And no one will even think to mention it in the same breath with the discussion of bailout funds for dying investment banks and the like.

This is pure waste. Our annual spending on "national security" -- meaning the defense budget plus all military expenditures hidden in the budgets for the departments of Energy, State, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, the CIA, and numerous other places in the executive branch -- already exceeds a trillion dollars, an amount larger than that of all other national defense budgets combined. Not only was there no significant media coverage of this latest appropriation, there have been no signs of even the slightest urge to inquire into the relationship between our bloated military, our staggering weapons expenditures, our extravagantly expensive failed wars abroad, and the financial catastrophe on Wall Street.

The only Congressional "commentary" on the size of our military outlay was the usual pompous drivel about how a failure to vote for the defense authorization bill would betray our troops. The aged Senator John Warner (R-Va), former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, implored his Republican colleagues to vote for the bill "out of respect for military personnel." He seems to be unaware that these troops are actually volunteers, not draftees, and that they joined the armed forces as a matter of career choice, rather than because the nation demanded such a sacrifice from them.

We would better respect our armed forces by bringing the futile and misbegotten wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to an end. A relative degree of peace and order has returned to Iraq not because of President Bush's belated reinforcement of our expeditionary army there (the so-called surge), but thanks to shifting internal dynamics within Iraq and in the Middle East region generally. Such shifts include a growing awareness among Iraq's Sunni population of the need to restore law and order, a growing confidence among Iraqi Shiites of their nearly unassailable position of political influence in the country, and a growing awareness among Sunni nations that the ill-informed war of aggression the Bush administration waged against Iraq has vastly increased the influence of Shiism and Iran in the region.

The continued presence of American troops and their heavily reinforced bases in Iraq threaten this return to relative stability. The refusal of the Shia government of Iraq to agree to an American Status of Forces Agreement -- much desired by the Bush administration -- that would exempt off-duty American troops from Iraqi law is actually a good sign for the future of Iraq.

In Afghanistan, our historically deaf generals and civilian strategists do not seem to understand that our defeat by the Afghan insurgents is inevitable. Since the time of Alexander the Great, no foreign intruder has ever prevailed over Afghan guerrillas defending their home turf. The first Anglo-Afghan War (1838-1842) marked a particularly humiliating defeat of British imperialism at the very height of English military power in the Victorian era. The Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989) resulted in a Russian defeat so demoralizing that it contributed significantly to the disintegration of the former Soviet Union in 1991. We are now on track to repeat virtually all the errors committed by previous invaders of Afghanistan over the centuries.

In the past year, perhaps most disastrously, we have carried our Afghan war into Pakistan, a relatively wealthy and sophisticated nuclear power that has long cooperated with us militarily. Our recent bungling brutality along the Afghan-Pakistan border threatens to radicalize the Pashtuns in both countries and advance the interests of radical Islam throughout the region. The United States is now identified in each country mainly with Hellfire missiles, unmanned drones, special operations raids, and repeated incidents of the killing of innocent bystanders.

The brutal bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, on September 20, 2008, was a powerful indicator of the spreading strength of virulent anti-American sentiment in the area. The hotel was a well-known watering hole for American Marines, Special Forces troops, and CIA agents. Our military activities in Pakistan have been as misguided as the Nixon-Kissinger invasion of Cambodia in 1970. The end result will almost surely be the same.

We should begin our disengagement from Afghanistan at once. We dislike the Taliban's fundamentalist religious values, but the Afghan public, with its desperate desire for a return of law and order and the curbing of corruption, knows that the Taliban is the only political force in the country that has ever brought the opium trade under control. The Pakistanis and their effective army can defend their country from Taliban domination so long as we abandon the activities that are causing both Afghans and Pakistanis to see the Taliban as a lesser evil.

One of America's greatest authorities on the defense budget, Winslow Wheeler, worked for 31 years for Republican members of the Senate and for the General Accounting Office on military expenditures. His conclusion, when it comes to the fiscal sanity of our military spending, is devastating:

"America's defense budget is now larger in inflation-adjusted dollars than at any point since the end of World War II, and yet our Army has fewer combat brigades than at any point in that period; our Navy has fewer combat ships; and the Air Force has fewer combat aircraft. Our major equipment inventories for these major forces are older on average than any point since 1946 -- or in some cases, in our entire history."

This in itself is a national disgrace. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on present and future wars that have nothing to do with our national security is simply obscene. And yet Congress has been corrupted by the military-industrial complex into believing that, by voting for more defense spending, they are supplying "jobs" for the economy. In fact, they are only diverting scarce resources from the desperately needed rebuilding of the American infrastructure and other crucial spending necessities into utterly wasteful munitions. If we cannot cut back our longstanding, ever increasing military spending in a major way, then the bankruptcy of the United States is inevitable. As the current Wall Street meltdown has demonstrated, that is no longer an abstract possibility but a growing likelihood. We do not have much time left.

Wall Street's Comeback as the Place Americans Love to HateBy Steve Fraser

Wall Street sits at the eye of a political hurricane. Its enemies converge from every point on the compass. What a stunning turn of events.

For well more than half a century Wall Street has enjoyed a remarkable political immunity, but matters were not always like that. Now, with history marching forward in seven league boots, we are about to revisit a time when the Street functioned as the country's lightning rod, attracting its deepest animosities and most passionate desires for economic justice and democracy.

For the better part of a century, from the 1870s through the tumultuous years of the Great Depression and the New Deal, the specter of Wall Street haunted the popular political imagination. For Populists it was the "Great Satan," its stranglehold over the country's credit system being held responsible for driving the family farmer to the edge of extinction and beyond.

For legions mobilized in the anti-monopoly movement, Wall Street was the prime engine house of monopoly capitalism, leaving behind it a trail of victimized businesses, consumers, captive municipalities, and crushed workers. For Progressive reformers around the turn of the twentieth century, Wall Street's "money trust" was the mother of all trusts, its tentacles -- and the octopus was indeed a popular image of the time -- choking off economic opportunity for all but a favored few. Its political power in Congress, in presidential cabinets, in statehouses, in both major political parties was seen as so overwhelming as to threaten to suffocate democracy itself.

All the periodic panics and depressions -- 1873, 1884, 1893, 1907, and 1913 -- that, with numbing regularity, punctuated economic life until the Crash of '29 and the Great Depression brought the house down seemed to begin on the Street. And whether they actually began there or not, all the misery that followed in their wake -- the homelessness, the armies of tramps and hobos, the starvation, the bankruptcies, the broken families, the crushing sense of dispossession -- was regularly laid at the feet of the Street.

Despite the hot-tempered invective directed its way, the "Great Satan" didn't face its comeuppance until the New Deal in the 1930s. Then, all its transgressions -- its speculative greed, its felonious insider-dealing, its cynical manipulation of popular credulity, its extravagant incompetence and seemingly limitless capacity for self-delusion -- left Wall Street truly vulnerable. Its reputation had struck bottom.

Wall Street's Invisible Decades

Just like our Wall Street heroes of the recent past, so, too, back in the 1920s the savants of the Street claimed credit for the rickety prosperity of the Jazz Age. With the Crash they took the blame for the disaster, just as they had taken the credit for the prosperity, and were despised for their hypocrisy as well. Just as seems to be starting to happen today, Congressmen, some of whom had spent their careers genuflecting before the titans of Wall Street, suddenly hauled them before investigating committees, there to be defrocked, treated to a withering storm of biblically-inspired injunctions and Shakespearean curses, and indicted in the court of public opinion. Wall Street was, as it now seems about to be again, excommunicated.

Suddenly weak beyond compare, the Street was powerless to resist Franklin D. Roosevelt's regulatory state. In rapid succession came the Glass-Steagall banking act and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the two securities acts of 1933 and 1934, the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and much more. When, in 1936, the President summoned the people to battle against the "economic royalists" everyone knew just who he was talking about.

It's long been said that FDR's New Deal saved capitalism from itself. That is true. One ironic consequence of that fateful turn of events was, politically speaking, to cloak Wall Street in invisibility. After all the shouting was over, after the installation of legislative reforms had further chastened an already cowed Street and constrained its penchant for financial wilding, it ceased to function as the magnetic north for all those troubled by the inequities, injustices, and deformations of capitalism.

During the long prosperity of the post-war years from 1945 to 1970, when the income and wealth inequalities that had always been associated with Wall Street narrowed dramatically -- economic historians know this as "the great compression" -- news of the Street retreated to the business pages and remained there. Except for an occasional act of street theater, even in the tumultuous 1960s, the Street remained largely exempt from sustained political criticism. Once the bête noire of all those who found themselves in opposition to the ravages of laissez-faire capitalism, Wall Street had been neutered.

Just as remarkable is how long that immunity from criticism lasted. After all, Wall Street's record over the past quarter century is nothing to boast about -- unless, that is, you happened to have made your living on it or in its environs.

Beginning in the 1980s, the Street supervised and profited handsomely from the de-industrialization of America. "Lean and mean" capitalism, the watchword of the Reagan era, added up to the systematic dismantling of the core of American industry. This was done in the interests of "shareholder value," as well, of course, as the bounteous short-term returns offered by the merger, acquisition, and junk-bond mania of those years. Did the rise of a speculative economy of virtual wealth and the fall of an economy that had once employed millions productively at decent wages disturb the political equanimity of American public life? Barely.

When the financial regulatory apparatus of the New Deal was weakened, piece by piece, or simply eliminated by a triumphant conservatism, the economy began to re-experience the cycles of bubble and bust so familiar to previous generations of Americans. In 1987, the stock market briefly collapsed. Then, during the late 1980s, a large-scale savings and loan bailout was accompanied by the rescue of banks caught short holding shaky Latin American debt. Not long after that came the savaging of the "Asian tiger" economies by Thomas Friedman's "electronic herd" of speculators, and the government-arranged bailout of that period's biggest hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management.

Before the country could catch its breath, matters got really serious with the popping of the dot.com bubble, Enronization, and finally, of course, our current catastrophe. Through all of this -- until now -- the political fallout was virtually nil. Sarbanes-Oxely, the act passed by Congress in 2002 in response to an avalanche of Wall Street and corporate scandals that began with Enron, was a remarkably tepid piece of reformist legislation, given the scale of the debauch; yet, within moments of its passage, howls of protest could be heard from our offended friends on the Street, grievous complaints treated with all due seriousness by the media, somehow still infatuated with Wall Street's rain-makers.

The Return of the Repressed

No longer. There is a new agenda in America and it calls for re-regulation, recovery, and retribution. It is enough to make one gasp in disbelief, but nowadays there is practically universal agreement that the financial sector must be more or less rigorously reined in and regulated. (Hedge fund managers and some other hold-outs demur, of course.) Yet mere weeks ago, "government regulation" was still a phrase to be avoided like the plague, ranking right up there with "liberal" in the vocabulary of political obloquy.

It's hard not to be reminded of just how quickly the political chemistry of the country changed at the end of the 1920s. The presiding figure who had loomed over that decade was Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon -- then considered the greatest Treasury secretary since Hamilton. His insane faith in the free market led him to suggest to President Herbert Hoover that the way out of the Depression was to do nothing, except "liquidate stocks, liquidate labor, liquidate the farmer, liquidate real estate." That thought earned him the enmity of a once admiring country. So, too, laissez-faire has suddenly become much too French for Americans who, but moments ago, treated it like the Holy Grail. We are all regulators today.

Of course, the devil, as every politician on television now makes sure to say, will lie in the details of just what re-regulation consists of. If all it involves is transparency, that won't be nearly enough. After all, that is precisely what Sarbanes-Oxley promised when it required financial institutions to make full disclosure of their activities. When it comes to circumventing the rules of information sharing so as to leave the insiders in the know and the rest of us out in the cold, where there's a will, there will always be a way. The new regulatory regime must have powers that extend beyond umpiring. New rules need to be invented whose purpose is as much to assure economic recovery and equity as it is to police the borders of illegality.

Indeed, popular anger fueling the regulatory crusade now seems to be coupled with a deep-running fear of a coming depression and an urge to reverse course. This, too, is symptomatic of a shift in the axis of political debate, in the zeitgeist, if you will.

The meltdown of the financial system has called into question American economic behavior over the last generation. Wall Street has come to stand for a paper economy that produces nothing useful, nothing tangible the way it once did. It has frittered away resources on embarrassingly grotesque forms of conspicuous consumption and patently non-productive forms of investment. It has left the real economy underdeveloped, its infrastructure rotting away in plain sight, its wealth fractured by unprecedented inequalities, dependent on sweated labor, and its industries, across a broad spectrum, technologically second-rate. It has left the country lost in a sea of debt and headed for an abyss of unemployment, bankruptcy, and evictions. Somehow regulation -- although not all by itself -- must address this, or so, for the first time in a long while, large numbers of Americans hope and desire.

People are now looking to the government -- that ogre of the dying old order -- as the only power resourceful and strong enough to direct the flow of capital where it's needed rather than where the discredited overlords of the financial system think may be most profitable. Conservatives, especially those who rightly balk at the mega-bailout now in the works as unfair to the American taxpayer, decry what they call financial socialism. But what then?

The Meaning of Retribution

As it did in 1929, the free market has failed beyond tolerance. Overwhelming popular sentiment (which each new poll registers with added vehemence) may, sooner or later, bring not only a full recognition of just how wrong-headed the country has been for how long, but how much in need it is of fresh institutions. New forms of public authority, closely overseen by the mechanisms of democracy rather than turned over to some autocrat on leave from his day job as an investment banker, might have a chance of doing what was once unthinkable: de-sanctifying private property and compelling it to perform in the general interest when its private misuse has placed us all in peril. The New Deal ventured in that direction. We need to venture further.

Here's a first principle: Refuse to reward those institutions that have done us no service. If that entails their liquidation (to borrow a word from Andrew Mellon), so be it. The world won't end, only the world as they have known it.

Let's use what's left of their grossly inflated assets to re-start the engines of real economic development. Compel investment in the re-industrialization of the country along lines that reward labor not parasitism, end the reign of the sweatshop, rescue the country from environmental suicide, revise the division of wealth and income so we can all live free of the indecencies of lavish piggery, and insist that social responsibility takes precedence over the bottom line.

Many will seek retribution as well, just as Americans used to do in the decades before the Great Depression. How could they not? That's what happens when simple rage turns into moral outrage, when people are finally called to account for the damage they've done. The emotion fuels a chemical reaction even now at work in our cultural innards. It may prove the catalyst for an intellectual and emotional explosion that someday will add up to a genuine break with the past. It did so back in 1929.

However justifiable, cutting CEOs loose from the life-support systems they've used to drain corporate treasuries for decades is small potatoes. Do it, but let's hope the instinct for retribution will be turned to better purposes -- to, in fact, reintroducing into our political life and our economic behavior an ethos of social solidarity. Let's see where that might take us. We could do much worse.